What they knew in 1985
17 years ago, a report on clergy sex abuse warned U.S. bishops of trouble
ahead

By Thomas C. Fox
National Catholic Reporter
May 17, 2002

http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives2/2002b/051702/051702a.htm

[Links in the article below have been supplied by BishopAccountability.org.
They were not in this article as originally posted.]

As attorneys across the nation press countless clergy sex abuse cases
against the church, two critical questions they most often ask are: “What
did the bishop know?” and “When did he know it?” At
stake is episcopal culpability. Also at stake in thousands of lawsuits,
many filed and many others still being planned, is potentially billions
of dollars in payments to victims.

In light of these developments, a 92-page report
on clergy sex abuse, distributed to the U.S. bishops in May 1985,
warning them of the trouble ahead, has been repeatedly cited by victims’
attorneys as a hard measure of episcopal negligence. The document, reportedly
referred to in more than 100 lawsuits, is well known to the bishops.

In some ways this is a story of what might have been or, perhaps, what
might have been avoided.

As the bishops prepare for their June meeting in Dallas at which they
are expected to formulate their responses to the clergy sex abuse scandal,
the names of two priests and an attorney, Fr. Michael Peterson, Dominican
Fr. Thomas Doyle and Ray Mouton, are likely to haunt them. These are the
names of the men who attempted to warn the bishops in 1985, pleading with
them to take firm actions on the sex abuse cases.

The authors maintained that the bishops ignored their recommendations.
For their part, the bishops deny that claim.

It was in January 1985 that Peterson, then director of St. Luke Institute
in Silver Spring, Md.; Doyle, a canonist at the office of the papal nuncio,
or pope’s representative, in Washington D.C.; and Mouton, a civil
attorney representing a priest, Fr. Gilbert Gauthe, then charged with
pedophilia, began their collaboration. The collaboration continued over
five months and resulted in the report, backed with more than 100 pages
of supporting evidence. The report covered the civil, canonical, and psychological
aspects of priest sexual involvement with children.

When the men turned over their findings to the bishops, it might have
seemed extreme to some; today it reads as a prophetic document.

The Catholic church, the three men wrote, faces “extremely serious
financial consequences” and “significant injury” to
its image as a result of the “sexual molestation of children by
clerics, priests, permanent deacons and transient deacons, nonordained
religious, lay employees and seminarians.”

At the time the men finished the final draft of the report in June 1985,
they noted, more than $100 million in claims had been made against just
one diocese as a result of sexual contact between a priest “and
a number of minor children.” The report said the settlement for
seven cases, including fees and expenses, had exceeded $5 million, and
that “the average settlement for each case was nearly $500,000.”
It estimated that “total projected losses for the decade”
could rise to $1 billion.

The men also warned that television and newspaper reporters -- NCR was
cited by name -- were already on to the story and that the American Bar
Association and plaintiff lawyers were “conducting studies ... about
this new, developing area of law.”

“The potential exposure to the Catholic church ... is very great,”
the report added, recommending that clerics accused of abuse should not
be permitted to function “in any priestly capacity.”

High recidivism

While the report stated that treatment could “help rehabilitate
clerics so that they may return to active ministry,” the authors
conditioned that optimism with a warning that strict conditions and lifelong
treatment be imposed. Such treatment, the report said, should include
a minimum six-month stay in a treatment facility, six-to-12 months of
residence in a halfway house, and continuing treatment in an outpatient
setting. “Recidivism is so high with pedophilia ... that all controlled
studies have shown that traditional outpatient psychiatric or psychological
models alone do not work,” the report said.

The men tried to cajole the bishops into taking action, begging them
not to be defensive. “The purpose of this document ... is to educate
you as much as we can in our professional capacities and help keep you
abreast of developments in this sensitive and devastating area of human
behavior,” the report stated. It urged the bishops to abandon their
strategy of staying away from the media, warning, “in this sophisticated
society, a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or
cover up.”

Kristen Lombardi, writing in the Boston Phoenix, quoted Doyle as saying
he had high hopes that the U.S. bishops would receive the report well.
Doyle thought Boston Cardinal Bernard Law would play a key role. Law at
the time headed the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee
on Research and Pastoral Practices. He would be the person to lobby the
other bishops to bring the report to life. Doyle had known Law since the
late 1960s, Lombardi reported, since the time Law served as bishop of
the Springfield-Cape Girardeau diocese in Missouri.

The Boston archbishop, Doyle believed, could be counted on as a sympathetic
ear. “I told Bernie, ‘This is our report,’ ” Doyle
told Lombardi. “ ‘These are our recommendations. We need to
get the conference to study this.’ ” Law “was very supportive,”
Doyle said. He pledged to call for a special ad hoc committee to study
the problem.

At the June 1985 meeting of the U.S. bishops at St. John’s Abbey
in Collegeville, Minn., the bishops were quietly briefed on the report’s
contents. But, according to Doyle, the committee headed by Law never followed
through on the promise to create the ad hoc committee.

On May 8 of this year, Law appeared in Suffolk County Superior Court
to begin a deposition requested by an attorney for 86 people who have
brought a civil suit accusing Law of negligence as supervisor of defrocked
priest John Geoghan, now serving a 10-year prison sentence for sexual
abuse of a child (NCR, Feb. 1).

The deposition proceeding on May 8 included some questions about Law’s
relationship with Doyle, but no mention of Doyle’s 1985 report to
the bishops. Scheduled to last three days, the deposition was expected
to continue May 9, after NCR went to press.

While on May 8 Law admitted to speaking with Doyle during the time the
report was being written and distributed to the bishops, he only recalled
“in a vague way” Doyle’s concerns about the effectiveness
of treatment centers. Furthermore, Law said he did not recall Doyle asking
for a committee to help the bishops focus more directly on the clergy
sex abuse issue.

Law said that sometime after his conversations with Doyle about issues
of clergy sex abuse he put in place a team of psychiatrists to advise
the archdiocese on the issue, though he said it was “not because
of conversations with Fr. Doyle” that he created the team.

In 1992, Doyle lamented the failure of the bishops to take action on
the abuse crisis. “Nothing happened,” he told a group of abuse
victims at a gathering in October outside of Chicago. “Why the inaction?
Why the denial?”

Doyle responded to his own questions. “To acknowledge the problem
in its fullness would open the whole [clerical] system to critique,”
he said. “It would weaken the presumed power base and strength of
the hierarchy.” That day he characterized the church as having a
“closed-in, clerical culture” that attempts to maintain deep
distinctions between clergy and laity. “We are somehow different,
apart and above the laity,” he added, claiming that this separation
had added to the crisis by keeping the clergy aloof from the consequences
of their actions on victims and others.

To many of the survivors at the gathering Doyle was one of their last
links to the Catholic church. His calls for church reform that year led
him to be chosen as recipient of the $10,000 Cavallo Prize for Moral Courage.
The award, given by the Cavallo Foundation since 1988, goes to someone
who “has chosen to speak out when it would have been far easier
to remain silent.” Doyle described the gathering that weekend as
“part of a momentous movement,” an awakening to the recognition
of a need for “massive reform.”

Jason Berry, a Louisiana-based freelance reporter, first started writing
about clergy sex abuse after Fr. Gilbert Gauthe in Lafayette, La., was
indicted on charges of having molested 35 children. He covered the Gauthe
trial for the National Catholic Reporter, contributed to other NCR investigations
on the widening crisis, and wrote a book on the sex abuse issue, Lead
Us Not Into Temptation. Along with Doyle, Berry was also at the 1992 conference
sponsored by VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup), a lay network that
claimed to be in touch with about 3,000 clergy sexual-abuse victims and
their supporters.

In his book, Berry recalled how Doyle first entered the Gauthe case.
In the 1970s, Doyle had earned a master’s in theology from Aquinas
Institute in Dubuque, Iowa, and a canon law degree from The Catholic University
of America in Washington. He was working in the Chicago archdiocese, assisting
couples with marriage annulments when, in September 1981, Archbishop Pio
Laghi, then the papal representative to the United States, asked him to
join the embassy staff in Washington as secretary-canonist.

A few years later, in 1984, several attorneys filed civil suits against
the Lafayette diocese on behalf of abused children. One, filed by J. Minos
Simon, caught Doyle’s attention because Simon named Pope John Paul
II as a defendant. Doyle became disturbed that the U.S. bishops seemed
to have little understanding of the magnitude of the matter. So he turned
to Peterson for help. Peterson was a psychiatrist and founder of St. Luke
Institute, a facility originally designed to assist religious and clergy
with alcoholic and chemical dependencies. However, in the years that followed
its opening in 1981, St. Luke began to treat clergy involved in sex abuse
cases.

It was during the same period that Lafayette attorney F. Ray Mouton Jr.
was defending Gauthe. He also sought out Peterson’s assistance,
planning a possible insanity defense. Although Mouton eventually discarded
that part of his strategy, according to Berry, Peterson felt it beneficial
to introduce Mouton to Doyle.

“When I first met Tom Doyle in the Vatican Embassy he knew nothing
about pedophilia,” Berry quoted Mouton as saying. “Within
a short time he was one of the leading authorities and one of the only
two priests I encountered in the country who were unafraid to acknowledge
the problem and deal with it honestly. … Tom Doyle always did the
right thing. He has never hesitated. And it cost him dearly.”

Trying to ward off the growing catastrophe they saw coming, Doyle, Mouton
and Peterson collaborated quietly for months on the report before taking
it to the bishops.

Knowing the bishops were taking up the report, Eugene Kennedy, a psychologist
and longtime chronicler of the American church, and I attended the Collegeville
meeting. When it became apparent that the bishops were only going to deal
with the matter in executive session and after they played down the significance
of the report, Kennedy became gloomy. He said at the time that the bishops
were missing an historic opportunity. He predicted that the teaching authority
of the U.S. bishops was now certain to decline.

No concrete actions

No concrete actions came out of that meeting. Yet the bishops have maintained
that they did listen attentively to the report. A recent staff review
found that, “with few exceptions,” the issues identified in
the report were analyzed for the bishops by their staff and other experts,
especially at the Collegeville meeting.

The bishops, however, noted that they turned down the report’s
suggestion of a national intervention team (a doctor, a canonist and a
lawyer) to respond to complaints in individual dioceses. “Dioceses
prefer to respond through their own expert personnel, rather than a national
team, due to factual and legal uniqueness of each accusation,” the
bishops’ staff report stated. “Media characterizations of
the report as a proposal either ignored or summarily rejected by the conference
are inaccurate,” they said.

In the months and years that followed Collegeville, Doyle persisted in
sounding the alarm. He clearly paid a price. In 1986 he was removed from
the embassy; he also lost his teaching position in canon law at Catholic
University. By several accounts he became ostracized by the bishops. That’s
when he decided to take his ministry into the military where, on the side,
he counseled abuse victims.

While Doyle lost favor with the church hierarchy, his former boss, Laghi,
did not. He had served as Vatican representative to the United States
from 1980 to 1990, the period during which the clergy abuse issue went
largely unattended by the church hierarchy. After the completion of that
diplomatic tour, he returned to Rome, and Pope John Paul II named him
a cardinal in June 1991.

Peterson was another major author of the report. He was a psychiatrist
before he entered the priesthood. I first ran into Peterson when I was
a freshman at Stanford University in 1963. We frequently bicycled together
to St. Ann Chapel, adjacent to the Newman Center in Palo Alto, Calif.,
several miles from the university campus.

Peterson had grown up as a Mormon and had converted to Catholicism at
the age of 19. For years at college he went to daily Mass. He was an intelligent
student with a sensitive nature and an irreverent sense of humor, attributes
that accompanied him through life.

Years passed before I encountered him again, after he had finished his
psychiatric degree and entered the priesthood. In the early 1980s he represented
a new breed of priests, active in new professional ministries.

On numerous occasions following Collegeville, Peterson shared with me
his disappointment that the bishops had not responded forcefully to their
report. He, too, saw a dark cloud on the horizon. During those years as
director of St. Luke Institute, Peterson also became a controversial figure.
He shared with a close circle of friends that he was gay and later that
he had contracted the AIDS virus. Peterson died in April 1987 and was
buried at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. The burial Mass
drew scores of priests and a half-dozen bishops.

By the time of Peterson’s death, Cardinal James Hickey of Washington
had come to rely on Peterson, along with a number of bishops, for advice
in handling sex-offending members of the clergy. During the Mass, Hickey
praised Peterson’s work at St. Luke Institute, calling him a “brilliant
and hard-working priest.”

While Hickey had grown close to Peterson, others in the Catholic hierarchy,
including members of the Roman curia, kept their distance. This ambivalence
among the church leadership toward St. Luke and Peterson’s work
surfaced publicly in 1993 after Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl tried to
oust from his diocese Fr. Anthony Cipolla, who had been accused by a teenage
boy of molestation. Cipolla had ties to Mother Angelica’s television
ministry.

Following the accusation charges, Wuerl had Cipolla evaluated at St.
Luke, where staff found no evidence Cipolla was a pedophile but nevertheless
recommended he be kept away from children.

Cipolla appealed to the Vatican Signatura, the church’s highest
court. Blasting the St. Luke evaluation, it ruled against Wuerl, telling
him to reinstate Cipolla.

The Signatura’s brief, later published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
stated: “St. Luke Institute, a clinic founded by a priest who is
openly homosexual and based on a mixed doctrine of Freudian pan-sexualism
and behaviorism, is surely not a suitable institution apt to judge rightly
about the beliefs and the lifestyle of a Catholic priest.”

Fr. Canice Connors, then president of St. Luke, responded: “Since
its foundation in 1981, St. Luke Institute has been grounded in the Christian
principles enunciated by Jesus Christ. ... To say that St. Luke Institute
is not Christian is like saying a flower can exist without sunlight. At
no point in the process of reaching its verdict about Cipolla was the
Signatura in touch with any of the members of the staff of St. Luke Institute.
Because of that lack of contact, I am deeply disappointed in the process
leading to the Signatura’s decision.”

Wuerl persisted, and two years later the Vatican court reversed itself
and supported the decision to remove the priest.

It was not until 1993, when they formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual
Abuse, that the U.S. bishops first tackled the clergy sex abuse issue
as a national conference. In the years that followed, the committee developed
and discussed with the bishops diocesan resources for assisting victims
and families. The committee also issued guidelines for removing priests
and for abuse prevention programs.

Pope John Paul II issued his first condemnation of clergy sex abuse in
1993. At the time he announced the formation of a joint study commission
to address U.S. bishops’ concerns about canonical problems in dealing
with priest abusers. Late in the year, a joint Vatican-U.S. bishops’
study commission issued revised guidelines for removing wayward priests.
The pope approved the guidelines, on an experimental basis, in April 1994.

In 1994, according to a bishop’s spokesperson, when the committee
asked dioceses to send in their existing policies, 178 of the 188 dioceses
responded. Of those, 157 submitted policies, 13 said they did not have
a written policy, and eight said they were working on a policy.

The Ad Hoc committee received unwanted attention in early April this
year, when its head, Bishop John B. McCormack of Concord, N.H., stepped
down from his post after his own handling of priests accused of sex abuse
had been called into question. McCormack said his decision was not prompted
by the scandal but by his desire to focus on work in New Hampshire. McCormack
was replaced by Archbishop Harry J. Flynn of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The committee’s credibility had earlier been called into question
by reports that two of its members had been accused in lawsuits of helping
protect priests who molested children.

McCormack was accused in Massachusetts lawsuits of knowing priests were
abusing boys and failing to intervene, and of playing a role in shuffling
offenders among parishes. Another committee member, Bishop John Gaydos
of Jefferson City, Mo., has been accused in a suit of conspiring to cover
up molestation by then-Fr. Anthony O’Connell, who resigned in February
as bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., after admitting he abused a seminary student
in Missouri more than 25 years ago. Gaydos has denied the allegations.

A third bishop on the ad hoc committee, Auxiliary Bishop A. James Quinn
of Cleveland, suggested in a 1990 speech that church leaders hide records
of abusive priests in the Vatican embassy, which has diplomatic immunity.
His comments are being used in a sex abuse lawsuit that names all U.S.
bishops as defendants.